


Got My Back

by qwanderer



Series: the Rhodey files [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Gang Culture, Gen, Trust, mostly headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-04-01
Packaged: 2018-01-17 20:32:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1401544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwanderer/pseuds/qwanderer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the history of Rhodey and Tony's friendship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Got My Back

Rhodey was a smart guy, but he'd always known that he couldn't keep up with Tony. 

Way back when they met, when Rhodey was in a programming class at MIT and he couldn't afford a tutor and everyone knew Tony was the guy to talk to for programming help, but Rhodey was the only one who was the right combination of not too proud to ask a sixteen-year-old runt for help and actually intelligent enough to benefit from it. Tony got him through that class, and helped with a bunch of others. 

Rhodey owed him a lot. 

Growing up poor and black in Philly in the early 70's, Rhodey absorbed certain things from a culture dominated by the Black Mafia. You stick to the people who stick to you. You have each other's backs. No one is safe, anywhere, ever, from being shot. And if you owe someone a favor? You don't ever forget it; you pay it back. 

All this made James Rhodes uniquely qualified to be Tony Stark's friend. 

Tony was popular at MIT, loved to socialize and drink when he wasn't working, loved to charm the pants off his fellow students. Until that first assassination attempt. His more casual acquaintances drifted away first, uncomfortable with the risks that, it had become clear, came with being near Tony. The rest were driven away by Tony's changed personality, his anger, his volatility, the distance he'd started cultivating between himself and the rest of the world. 

It was clear to Rhodey that he had to stick it out. The danger wasn't even a factor. He owed Tony. There was no one else. So he had Tony's back. 

Once Tony figured out that Rhodey wasn't going anywhere, he stuck to his friend like glue. It was pretty gratifying for Rhodey to see, to know he was the only person who Tony Stark really trusted. 

They'd had each other's backs ever since, working together to get the best weapons out to America's troops. Because the military had become Rhodey's new gang; every single man and woman in the service, they had each other's backs, and the uniforms were their colors. Because that was how Rhodey worked. 

Maybe Tony wasn't the most professional guy, maybe he wasn't the most dependable about some things, but that was just Tony and Rhodey accepted that he wasn't gonna be able to change that, especially since he'd figured out that Stark worked better when left to his own devices, and the military ended up getting more out of that than they would have out of his promptness or politeness. 

And when Tony disappeared, Rhodes never stopped searching the desert, because that was how Rhodey worked. 

Rhodey had worked this way all his life. He'd been all about loyalty, all about being stronger together than alone. So when Tony tried to back out of all the support he'd been providing for the military, Rhodey... took it badly. 

Tony Stark was turning his back on all those people whose lives were intertwined with Rhodey's, and therefore Tony's. Tony Stark was leaving them all more vulnerable than they had to be. And Rhodey couldn't stand there and listen to him make excuses. Tony was clearly the expert on mechanics, but this was morals. It was usually clear to Rhodey what was right, and Tony pretty much always agreed, when he wasn't trivializing and making trouble for attention. And if that was what this was? 

"What you need is time," Rhodey told his best friend, "to get your mind right." 

It took a long time for Rhodey to really get that this was Tony growing up and learning to choose his own right and wrong. That before, Tony had only had ties to one person, Rhodey, and had watched as Rhodes climbed the ranks by extending that same mutual trust to a whole organization. That Tony had, in his own special way, decided to go big or go home, and had taken in trust the whole of every human life on Earth. 

That Tony had asked for Rhodey's trust in something important for once, and Rhodey had failed to extend it. 

It took him a lot longer than it should have. Not even holding the arc reactor in his hand and watching Tony replace the corroded palladium cartridge, not even that fully seated it in his mind. He was still too busy urging Tony to trust him, to let him help. The thing between them, it had broken, and it had never quite healed right. Their ideas of what trust meant were too different, even after all the time they'd known each other. 

But they would always, always, always have each other's backs. As best they knew how, no matter what.


End file.
